Bill Maher continued to diminish Rush Limbaugh’s sexist attacks on Sandra Fluke and attack liberals for overreacting. On his HBO show last night, Maher said that liberals should “put this in perspective… a guy made a bad joke.” He added in that in America “sometimes you’re made to feel uncomfortable.”

Actually, Limbaugh launched hateful attacks against Fluke seventy times over three days. You can watch all of Limbaugh’s attacks on Fluke here. He doesn’t appear to be joking.

Maher insisted that he was not, in fact, defending Limbaugh but “defending living in a country where people don’t have to be afraid that they might go out of the bounds for one minute. Do we all want to be talking like White House spokesmen?” Watch it:

Maher also framed the criticisms of Limbaugh as an attack on “free speech.” But the issue is not whether Limbaugh was free to say what he did about Sandra Fluke. Hundreds of thousands of people are asking advertisers and others if they want to continue to pay for Limbaugh’s speech. At least 98 major advertisers have said no and canceled their ads.

Maher also dismissed Limbaugh’s comments by noting that “no one died.” The same talking point was echoed by Tucker Carlson who argued, oddly, that we should cut Limbaugh some slack because Don King was convicted of manslaughter in 1966 and still has a career. Carlson, like Maher, has his own history of mysoginistic comments. Last year he tweeted, “Palin’s popularity falling in Iowa, but maintains lead to become supreme commander of Milfistan.” He later apologized.

Like ThinkProgress on Facebook

By clicking and submitting a comment I acknowledge the ThinkProgress Privacy Policy and agree to the ThinkProgress Terms of Use. I understand that my comments are also being governed by Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, or Hotmail’s Terms of Use and Privacy Policies as applicable, which can be found here.